Adrian Michaels is Group Foreign Editor at the Telegraph Media Group. You can write to adrian.michaels@telegraph.co.uk and follow @adrianmichaels on Twitter.

Italy can't beat England, and Americans can't write about sport(s)

Why can't Americans write about football (soccer) and cricket? Two more extraordinary examples of the genre have appeared in recent days. The New Yorker's efforts to explain a cricket match in Antigua (not linked from here as you have to subscribe) had me convulsed in pain. Bowling was changed to pitching or throwing while some inexplicable terms to outsiders such as crease were left in. The whole mess left me wondering why the magazine had bothered. I do appreciate this is not easy.

And today I have been reading the Wall Street Journal's Why Can't Italy Beat England?, an extraordinary piece that looks by the authors' names to have been written by at least one Italian or Italian American. Some of it is just jarring in style – as with the way Brits talk of "sport" but Americans of "sports", and a Brit would never say "Manchester United plays.." because a team is plural.

The rest of the piece commits far more grave errors, enough to undermine the whole's credibility. Among the problems:

"In the 1990s, Italian teams were the toast of Europe…The best players in the world including Diego Maradona and Zinedine Zidane flocked to the Serie A…"

Diego Maradona played almost all his Italian football in the 1980s.

"Italy's club teams often play with a more tactical, defensive approach, inspired by a strategy in the 1970s called catenaccio…It's an inversion of the typical national stereotypes: the Italian teams playing in a less spontaneous and passionate style than the supposedly straitlaced English…Italians have always been invaded and dominated, so we had to learn how to defend ourselves."

Give me strength.

"Average attendance at Serie A games has decreased 25% in the past decade, according to Deloitte's sports business group, while audiences in England increased by 18%… Games at Manchester United's Old Trafford stadium are filled on average 95% to capacity, while those at Inter Milan's San Siro are only 65% full."

From Goal.com: "The number of fans who attend matches in Serie A has seen an overall increase compared to the same period last year."

Also, to compound the idiocy, the article does not state that Old Trafford holds fewer people than the San Siro, nor that the San Siro is home to two teams, one of which, AC Milan, has average attendances of only 10,000 or so less than Manchester United's.

I am sorry to nitpick but as sport(s) fans know the world over, we are incredibly sensitive about what we read, and perfectly prepared to start a fight over it.